“There are several so-called critics—reviewers—who really hate my guts. There is one who slams a door in my face if he happens to pass through it ahead of me. But who cares? It’s wonderful to be hated by idiots.”

Susannah York is unconvincing at everything: lesbianism, childishness, acting…

Paul Simon’s lyrics alternate between nauseating poeticism (“Hello darkness, my old friend … Silence like a cancer grows … The words of the prophet are written on the subway wall … The sound of silence:) and trashy folksiness (“Here’s to you, Mrs. Robinson: Jesus loves you more than you can know”), and are set to his and Garfunkel’s music that is not so much rock as rock bottom. Nichols keeps reprising these decompositions, until the soundtrack resembles the streets of New York during the garbage collectors’ strike.

The kids themselves, with the exception of Cathy Burns (Rhoda), are not particularly good actors, and Barbara Hershey (Sandy, and not a kid anymore) looks, regrettably, much better with her bikini top on than off. Miss Burns, on the other hand, is an extremely accomplished little actress, but also insuperably homely — she looks, in fact, like a pink beach ball with a few limbs and features painted on it. There is no excuse for Rhoda’s being a positive freak, and making us feel she is damned lucky to have been raped at all.

Even more unpleasant, though, is Mimsy Farmer’s breathy Marilyn Monroe-Jackie Kennedy English, in which “charcoal,” for instance, is pronounced “chuhkuh,” the uh’s representing gusts of breath. An altogether dispensable girl, this Mimsy, looking and acting like a cross between Sandy Dennis and a young Lizabeth Scott, with added suggestions of Jean Seberg and a death’s-head.

Paul McCartney, a chubbily handsome young man, appears quite pleasant with, or despite, his generation-shaping look. But the others! Particularly grubby are John Lennon and his worse half, Yoko Ono, who sits, smug and possessive, almost always within touching distance of him. Flouting, it would seem, even minimal sanitary measures, their hair looks like a Disneyland for the insect world, and their complexions appear to be portable bacterial cultures.

God only knows where the notion that Miss Lansbury has class originated; perhaps her vestigial lower-middle-class English accent passes for that in our informed show-biz circles. She is, in fact, common; and her mugging, rattling-off or steam-rollering across her lines, and camping around merely make her into that most degraded thing an outré actress can decline into: a fag hag.

Mlle Deneuve can portray a cool clotheshorse with a schoolgirl emotion or two very nicely, as in La Chamade; beyond that her histrionic pittance will not stretch.

Stéphane Audran (Mme Chabrol — which explains a thing or two, though not everything) combines the vacuous, far-off gaze of a blind explorer with a surly, pinched delivery of lines as if they were shoes several sizes too small.

Joanna is played by Geneviève Waite, a piece of fluff with a thinnish sound piped into it (for all our advances in electronics, automata have not yet acquired fully human voices), and sliding whichever way the ground underneath inclines. As her ebony lover, Calvin Lockhart is like beautiful; as her lordly but moribund mentor, Donald Sutherland is nauseating: Toad of Toad Hall’s conception of Oscar Wilde.

The only absolute liability, in fact, is Irina Demick. When she was Darryl Zanuck’s special protegée, no further question was necessary; now that Zanuck’s attention has moved on, one must emphatically ask why Miss Demick remains.

It is regrettable to have both leading ladies in such a dashing film seemingly vie with each other for this year’s Homeliness Award, just as it is misguided to entrust the gallantly swashbuckling lead to David Hemmings, who, besides being a mediocre actor, looks in long shots like something out of Planet of the Apes.

Huston has directed in a bored and lackluster fashion, and his performing of a minor role is deplorably leprechaunish. The ending of the picture is an absolute botch, and there is a perfectly blank, supremely inept performance by Huston’s daughter, Anjelica, who has the face of an exhausted gnu, the voice of an unstrung tennis racket, and a figure of no describable shape.

Jean-Marie Patte seems miscast as Louis; he would have been much better as the protagonist of The Blob.

Meyer was equipped with a co-scenarist, the aforementioned Mr. Ebert, film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times and, by all accounts, a rather fey put-on artist.

Miss Hepburn’s quality was and will be that of an offbeat, madcap debutante, and she has now simply entered the emerita division of the same category. Her Aurelia is all huskily doddering sexiness and girlish flutters, senior division. When you think of the great Marguerite Moreno, who created the role, and then look at this performance, exact replicas of which have already earned Miss Hepburn two ill-deserved Oscars, you may wish to forsake the auditorium for the vomitorium.

But just how garish her commonplace accent, squeakily shrill voice, and the childish petulance with which she delivers her lines are, my pen is neither scratchy nor leaky enough to convey. The once pretty face has become coarse, though from a distance it can still look good — but only if it avoids any attempt at expression, as, to be sure, it not infrequently does. Only the bosom keeps implacably marching on — or down, as the case may be — but I do not feel qualified to be the Xenophon of this reverse anabasis.

It is really fun to read excerpts like these out loud to devoted fans of Minnelli, Streisand, etc–but there is of course more to Simon than these extreme, sometimes deliberately-attention-getting-seeming quotes. He is a brilliant, exacting, sensitive (and often surprisingly generous–more than I would be, at times) critic; a principled spine in the body of film criticism, which becomes more obvious when you consider the flab and fat surrounding him.

For me, Simon’s best nasty highlight was his skewering of Mick Jagger in Gimme Shelter. However his reviews, negative or positive, are always probing and insightful. A great example is his highly cultivated review of Lina Wertmueller’s “Seven Beauties”. For a deeply perceptive, negative review, look for his critique of “Last Tango in Paris”, which was universally acclaimed by most “important” critics like Pauline Kael and even, perversely, by feminist critics like Molly Haskell.